Amazing documentary tonight on BBC1 at 10.35pm - Four Born Every Second - a kind of global OBEM

[MmeLindor]

Here

I saw a preview today and it is both shocking and inspiring.

287,000 women die from pregnancy related causes every year, 99% of them in developing countries.

The film shows the difference between UK and US births and those in Cambodia and Sierra Leone.

It does contain quite distressing scenes of still birth, so maybe not for you if you are currently pregnant.

I blogged about it today (link on profile) to give you an idea what it is about and will be watching again tonight.

Polka
I still think that you are missing the point of this documentary.

It is not about the NHS, and although I agree there are reforms needed in both our welfare state, and to the NHS this should not be the focus of the discussion.

I am sorry that you have had negative experiences with the NHS, but these women are dying. Not as a one-off because of a mistake made by an overworked consultant, or because treatment was delayed.

Regularly. Daily. Hourly.

They are dying because they don't have emergency health care. For the cost of a loaf of bread in UK, they are dying.

I don't believe people have more children because of the good support single parent families have, here in Sweden the support for all families (not just poor single parent families) is much more generous than that in the UK but the birth rate is lower.

there's no way i would watch this but this discussion is interesting -
an acquanitance came to the NHS as a MW who had practiced in papua new guinea - she found the NHS shocking in some ways (rates of intervention, lack of Mw skill) and in others comforting (having been delivering babies without any options other than MW tactics, the obstetric options made a welcome safety net)

i don't think we should be uncritical of our own system just because it's worse elsewhere.

i would love to see more outreach from wealthy nations to help women and children overseas - it seems quite often what is missing are routine, cheap types of care that could make a huge difference.

Piedwagtail
I am sorry that you found the programme so upsetting. I don't think anyone was unaffected by it.

I mentioned the contraception because it irks me that women are blamed for getting pregnant, and because it wasn't really the focus of this programme.

i would love to see more outreach from wealthy nations to help women and children overseas - it seems quite often what is missing are routine, cheap types of care that could make a huge difference

Edgar - the cost of intervention is often very low. I met women in Kenya who had formed a collective to buy rain water tanks, to save the lives of the children of the village, many of whom were dying of D&V bugs. The tanks cost $100 - and these women saved for months to buy each family one.

Just watched it on iPlayer, amazing bit of film making. I have a friend who works in this field and I just have so much respect for her, makes what I do look utterly completely and totally pointless. Which it is, actually.

One thing that really struck me was that there are a lot of women on here who feel traumatised by their birth experience, which is entirely understandable, and I did feel that while the MsF doctors were doing an incredible job of saving lives it looked like the women in the SL delivery theatre didn't have any emotional support. I know it's going to be so so far down the list of priorities in a country with such high infant and maternal mortality rates, but I just felt desperately sad that they were going through it all with no one to hold their hand and explain what was happening, or seeing their stillborn babies whisked past them (couldn't tell how many ops were done whilst conscious). The singing midwife was amazing, it would be great if theere could be more lay volunteers on the pastoral side .

MMe these delays weren't minor or mistakes.They were due to money not being there,end of and to quote my consultant"things are only going to get worse".

No I didn't miss the point of the doc.

The point was where you live has a huge impact on wether you'll survive childbirth,how long you'll live, how long babies will live.It also highlighted the differences to some degree in being poor in each country.

It raised questions (re the NHS) as a good documentary always does.

I went to bed reeling last night after watching this - it was jaw droppingly sad and some of those statistics are terrifying. I have made a donation to MSF and would dearly love to do the same for somewhere in Cambodia - that little boy was the bravest soul ever. My DS3 is 13 and the thought of him having to take responsibility for 3 other people at his age is mind boggling.

The sadness shown by the MSF doctors when they were dealing with the uterus rupture and lost baby was touching, they must see things like that so often and yet are obviously deeply affected each time.

I feel very inadequate at what I have achieved in this world when you see people like those working so hard for others.

The msf doctor was amazing-he obviously deeply cared.I hope he gets support emotionally doing what he does.

Everyone will have have different point of view about the documentary. I'll tell you what went through my head when I watched it:

• This is how my parent's grew up no money, barely any food or prospects. But they've worked hard and found a new life elsewhere to ensure I had a chance in life.

• How lucky we are to have doctor's, nurses and hospitals. I recently had a serious accident and the lovely people at NHS direct and my local hospital saved my life.

• How lucky my DS was when he was born prematurely and was able to receive the care he needed.

• How so fortunate we are that healthcare is available to us all for free.

• How heartbreaking that there is still so much poverty in the world which is caused by greed and corruption.

• How heartbreaking that these women are still not getting the basic help they need and are still struggling to feed themselves and their children yet everyday they do whatever it takes to get some food on the table because if they don't no one will. These women still have hopes and dreams for their children and pray that they come true.

• How shocking that living in a developed country there are people who cannot or chose not to take responsibility for their actions. Who have children and yet expect the state to pic up the tab and put a roof over their head because it's their human right.

• How there are real cases of extreme poverty in this country too which people don't even know about or choose to ignore.

• How when having free education in this country there seems to be more and more children coming out of school who can barely read or write.

• How we are raising a generation who have no respect for themselves or other's and as a whole no ambition or drive in life.

• How this time next week the issues raised in this program will be a distant memory for many.

• How we are raising a generation who have no respect for themselves or other's and as a whole no ambition or drive in life.

are we? thats a rather harsh, sweeping and in my opinion inaccurate view

a whole generation

piedwagtail sorry, I guess that was just what stood out to me from your posts.
Anyway, I have been looking on twitter and the filming was supported by and made possible by Unicef. If anyone feels moved to do something, you can donate here

I haven't seen the doco (have recorded it to watch when the DCs are in bed).

I must admit I thought, perhaps mistakenly, that the documentary series was examining poverty and the causes of poverty- the title, "Four born every second" does imply that this programme would be examining over-population, doesn't it?

A horrible but salient 'fact' remains that if many more of these poor DC (and their mothers) lived, the majority of the populations of these deeply impoverished countries would face a future of starvation and their populations initially exploded. It has been shown that once you create security, some equality and stability in a country, its population stabilised and everyone's wealth increases.

The problem was and is poor governance, corruption and no respect for the Law in each country concerned. That is essentially why so many people are forced to live like this.

That doesn't mean I shrug my shoulders, far from it- but I don't know of any solutions that don't involve invasion. Particularly now that the Chinese are effectively buying up the 3rd world. Their 'aid' doesn't come with strings attached like free and fair elections, stamping out corruption etc. Unfortunately, just as the west was maybe, just maybe 'grown up' enough to begin to understand that all of our futures are bound up with every one else's, our star is on the (financial, which equals power and influence) wane. And it is no surprise that all these women (as I have read on here) seem completely unsupported by menfolk. It is, after all, pretty universally the greed of the menfolk (ie our leaders) which allow such abject poverty to go on and on into the 21st century.

Please note: I didn't say 'all men are to blame for this' just that 'those who are to blame for this tend to be overwhelmingly men'!

One in 8 women die in childbirth? that is AWFUL. this is what annoys me about alot of my friends at my breastfeeding group who all had 'natural/home/water births' who talk as though it was the best thing in the world, knowing i had the most medicated birth possible (sytocin induction, forceps, epidural and spinal block!) if these kinds of treatments werren't availble me and DS would of died.

Littentree
no, it focusses on how being born in poverty means for many babies not being born at all, or at the cost of the mother's life or health.

Many of the women who survive do so with terrible birth injuries, such as fistula, which make them pariahs in their villages.

The key to improving these women's lives is providing contraceptives, so that they don't have to keep having babies, and providing emergency health care so that if they do get pregnant, they and their babies survive the pregnancy.

I wrote this for the Gates Foundation on this topic.

Gates are one of the funders of this project, btw.

I just watched it on iplayer

wow, shocking, and made me cry many times

Im all for natural births and was lucky enough to have my baby easily at home..... but boy am i greatful for the ambulences and excellent care that was avaliable to me a short-ish drive away should i have needed it

thankfully I was lucky to have a baby head down, ready to go with my placenta in a safe place, and it was the antenatal care that meant i knew that too.

I too found this programme deeply disturbing. The first thing that it brought home to me is that those of us in the UK should treasure the NHS. This is not to say that it?s perfect and that we shouldn?t strive to make it even better, but we should appreciate it and not mind paying for it.
Secondly, I rather hoped that it might be shown in the USA because I can?t believe that people there really want to have the worst maternal and infant mortality death rate in the developed world. Perhaps they could be brought to understand that having the NHS doesn?t turn us all into communists.
For the other countries they should be criticised loud and long and their leaders frequently asked what they are doing to improve the lot of their womenfolk. It should be a subject high on the agenda in the United Nations.
I don?t agree that saving more children will necessarily add to the world population in the long run. One of the poor women in the film said that she was having lots of children in the hope that one of them would be lucky enough to be able to support the rest of the family. Educated women have smaller families and that in addition to improved health care we should be encouraging education, perhaps especially for girls.
I find it very sad that some contributors here have used this to criticise particular groups; we are all mothers and in some sense ?all in this together?.

Mme Lindor- of course, in many 'traditional' cultures, contraception is frowned upon if not actually illegal. The Big Man demonstrates his fertility and manliness by how many DC (read: sons?) he has.

Of course 'an answer' is educating women, conferencepear, providing the menfolk allow their DDs to get an education and their mothers do not worry that being 'too clever' will make them unmarriageable.

And it can take a generation for the positive effects of female education, widespread use of contraception and a feeling of security sufficient that you don't keep on having DC to ensure at least one can survive to support you in old age. That's another generation of want and poverty. So maybe not your 'long run' but a sufficient time scale to partially negate the above benefits. Did I read somewhere that the population of the Horn of Africa has quadrupled between BandAid, 25 years ago, and the latest humanitarian catastrophe?

As for 'criticising' particular groups, well, the problem you'll have is that 'being a mum' doesn't actually bind us to one, big, happy cooperative. We all function, as mothers or otherwise, within the boundaries and confines of our own cultures and backgrounds. We can all feel deep, individual sympathy for each and every one of these women, but the fact remains, some have the luxury of choice, some don't.

Mme do you think there is the notion that many woman will still not use contraception, in the hope that that the skills that a child may have may lift them out of thier situation and as one child dies they will have another to increase productivity of the family? not sure i worded that too well, but one of the woman said she will continue to have babies because on day one of them may be educated and go overseas to support her. I think that is quite an important point when considering health education and availability of contraception, will there be the demand and uptake of these resources?

Marking place, it's on my to-do list.

I saw this and cried, that poor boy having to scavenge for tins and rubbish to sell to buy rice, he should be learning in school and when his baby sister died I had to turn off.

We are so lucky to have the NHS.

Will be watching the next one.

I hadn't heard of this until just now and am currently at war with myself to watch it. I know through this thread that it will be shocking and harrowing and I'm shying away from seeing that, but on the other hand I feel I ought to watch it to truely understand the horrors faced by other mothers and babies across the world.

O is it a series. Must watch this.

I cried buckets during and after this prog and came on here hoping that someone knew of a way we could donate money to that poor boy who had to scavenge and who looked after his mum so sweetly. My heart ached for him.
I'm so grateful for the NHS and although I moan about my medicalised labour and birth with DS, I know that without it all we would both have both died :(